The Human Extreme
What is the price for incremental quality, and is it really worth it? How much is too much? What about when you can’t even tell the difference; or perhaps even care to? To add to the confusion, what about marketing or celebrity appeal?
Well, sometimes it’s not worth a damn – sometimes it’s worth everything. It just depends on who you are. Either way, once you look into it, you won’t see a thin veil of magic marketing and superficial shadows on the wall – you’ll see a tremendous drive and passion for pushing the limits of the human experience.
The Taste
For some people, salt is just salt. It goes on sale occasionally at Albertsons for $0.04/oz. Well, this almost ubiquitous seasoning is also one of the most sought after seasonings in the world. Walk outside the US and It comes in almost a hundred different ways which can range from your traditional table salt by Morton ($0.06/oz.), to Camargue’s Fleur de Sel from France at $2.16/oz. It can come from Peru, Hawaii, Himalayan, Maine, New Zealand, and all the various oceans, each finely gathered and closely guarded with their own distinct flavor. Try pouring Morton’s on your $90 4 oz. Japanese Kobe beef and most likely the executive chef will chase you out with a butcher knife.
The Smell
Back when I worked at Starbucks, all employees are forced to go through coffee tastings to better understand, appreciate, and market the various types of coffee. The first eight coffees I had gone through had “it tastes like coffee” under the “taste” category, and “it smells like coffee” scrawled in the “smell” category. After about six more however, I started to notice subtle differences. Nut. Oak. Sweetness. Cherries? Apples? How does one pick up a cherry smell from a coffee bean is beyond me, but I swear it smells like cherries. For a step above, all you need to do is look to your local wine merchant for an even more intense and extreme form of olfactory sensory perception. The very best “winos” as we call them, can tell the grape of a foreign wine they’ve never had from just a brief whiff of the ‘nose’, some being able to even tell the year and vineyard in which the wine came from, with 99% accuracy. If they’ve had the wine before, the accuracy creeps closer to 100%.
The Sight
Back in the day, a black-and-white TV picking up basic channels out of the air was frighteningly “lifelike.” Good enough? Hell no. If you compare an HD broadcast to an old TV on airwaves, the TV looks like a disgusting mess of scrambled eggs. The same goes with DVD and slightly less so, Blu-Ray. We’ve exponentially multiplied the number of pixels from 345,600 (old TV) to 2,073,600 (HDTV,1080p) in a single frame. Sure, HDTV looks great, but we haven’t even scratched the surface of digital visual reproduction. When is it going to be enough? Researchers estimate that it’ll take about 15,000,000 pixels to make it indistinguishable to the human eye…so…we have a ways to go.
The Sound
Take a standard pair of headphones such as say, the headphones on your iPod. Sure, they sound pretty good. You can hear the music right? Well, by audiophile standards, the standard iPod headphones are pretty horrendous in sound reproduction.
Take a quick peek around, and you’ll find yourself easily forking over $80 to $120 for a decent pair of earbuds that will do your music justice. Right around there, you start running into your second barrier: the mp3 file sound quality. A standard mp3 comes in 128 to 192 kbps, but to really make use of your earbuds and push the limits of your iPod, you’ll need to find a source cleaner than that. Getting a song encoded in 256 or 320 kbps is the first step, the next is lossless (i.e. FLAC), and for the hardcore, the old-school *.wav file that’ll turn your normal 3.5 Mb file into a 44 Mb one.
Once you get a lossless album pumping through your iPod, you reach a third barrier: your headphones… again. Unless you’re really attached to earbuds and don’t mind paying up to $650 for custom earbuds perfectly molded specifically for your ear, you’ll probably move on to full headphones called ‘cans.’ Strange sounding companies such as Grado and Sennheiser make studio or reference versions of these that cost upwards of $800. But just as you’re feeling pretty good about your hard-core set of cans in your music backpack, you run into barrier number four: your iPod.
Your iPod is a pretty good at reproducing sound, but it’s noisy due to it’s compact circuitry and construction. To minimize this, you’ll want to turn the volume to the absolute minimum, and then buy a high-quality amplifier that has less noise than your iPod. These amplifiers are slowly getting more portable, and start at around $200 and go easily into the thousands. The standard audiophile listening pack carries a high quality music source, a powered amplifier, and a good set of cans.
But eventually, even the minimum amount of noise on the iPod is just too much, and the reproduction isn’t good enough…so you got to ditch it. This is where you hear people talking about how analogue sources such as record players “sound better” than digital sources such as CD players. Some hardcore audiophiles will go back and build their own fully insulated analogue players with vacuum tubes (because they sound better than today’s transistors). As my college Physics TA once said, “normal hearing is around 20Hz-20kHz, so most sound devices shoot for this range. About 10% of the population can hear around 15hz-22KHz, and they will pay thousands of dollars for super-accurate hardware that will allow them to hear those ranges.” For some, any pair of headphones or speakers will do – for others, the extra couple hundred dollars is completely worth it for audio nirvana.
The Speed
In this day and age, not many people ever need more than about 100 horsepower in a standard roadcar to safely maneuver their way to their destination. This includes accident avoidance, overtaking, and quick-starts off the shoulder. So why would anyone ever need 300 horsepower, which is standard on most $45,000 cars? It goes well beyond practicality and almost into bragging rights right? Well, for some, that sense of power is bit more sublime. The speed of a roadcar is akin to the pace of the human technological frontier. The passion and pursuit of speed is a bit like how you try to go higher and higher on a swing as a kid. It’s not necessarily about bragging rights, it’s just exhilarating in pushing the limits of yourself and the swing. Cars beyond $250,000 are not much more luxurious or comfortable than ones at $80,000. In fact, some are much less so. So what are you getting? It’s this pursuit of speed that is so strong in us, it keeps companies such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, and Porsche in business. Think $250,000 is too much for a 640 horsepower Ferrari? Consider $1.4 million for a 1,001 horsepower Bugatti Veyron. And yes, they are street-legal, normal roadcars that you could use everyday.
Leave a Reply